WHERE ARE THEY NOW? FINNIGIN ASK almost any 111an you know who r'l... is sixty years old-or older- and he will remember all about cCFinnigin." "Finnigin to Flannigan," that is; the fa1110us bit of light verse b h " b h ' . . " I a out t e oss av t slctlon w 10 wrote as follows to his "superin tin- d . "" Off ' . . lnt : agln, on agln, gone agln- Finnigin." The six verses of "Finnigin to Flannigan" will be found in any proper anthology of our less austere rhY111es, along with things like "The Face on the Barroom Floor." The ex- pression "off agin, on agin" has gone in- to the language. We said ask a 111an of sixty about "Finnigin" because young 111en in their twenties are apt to me1110- rize popular jingles, and a man who is sixty now was just twenty when "Fin- nigin" was written. The author of "The Face" has been dead these 111any years, but the author of "Finnigin" is still alive and much the same as he was w hen he wrote the verses, except that he is sixty-seven now instead of twenty- seven. He still goes about the country lecturing, as he did in his youth, and he still recites "Finnigin." He has recited it two or three thousand tÏ111es. His name, · if you have never heard it announced from a platform, is Strickland Gillilan. One day in February, 1897, in Rich- l11ond, Indiana, Strickland Gillilan, who was city editor, reporter, columnist, and ahl10st everything else on the little town's newspaper, the Palladium, heard a yarn about an Irish railroad section boss and his superintendent fro111 an Irishman in the newspaper office, named Fitzgibbons. (If nobody has ever told you about the situation that existed be- tween Finnigin and Flannigan, we're sorry for you.) Mr. Gillilan wrote the story up in his colu111n, as a brief anec- dote. The "off agin, on agin, gone agin" tag caught his readers' fancy; it caught his own fancy, too-he couldn't get it out of his mind, and he decided finally to do the thing over again, in verse. So he sat down and wrote it- on a piece of laundry wrapping paper, with pen and ink. . The printer who set it up in type grumbled about that and seems to have thrown the original away as soon as he was done with it. It wasn't Mr. Gillilan's final version, any- way. He rewrote the verses, polished the111 up, copied them on a typewriter, and sent the111 to Life. They ca111e to the desk of ,an assistant editor named Tho111as Masson. He thought they were quite C0111ic and bought the111. Just a few years ago Mr. Masson, in his 111e111oirs, told how close "Finnigin to Flannigan" ca111e to not being print- ed. He had bought the verses in the ab- sence of his editor-in-chief, Mr. J. A. Mitchell, and when the latter read the111 in proof he called in his assistant and said he thought they were undignified, 111uch too undignified for Life. Masson pleaded with hÎ111, and Mitchell finally relented on condition that "Finnigin" be run in the back pages of Life, not up front. This was done. It wasn't long before everybody in the country was saying "Off agin, on agin, gone agin-Finnigan." The jin- gle was recited hy vaudevillians, schoo] children, political orators, parlor per- for111ers, and whonot. Mr. Gillilan fi- nally took a hand and began reciting it himself. He had got sOl11ething of a na111e as an after-dinner speaker and took to going about the Indiana towns telling stories, reciting "Finnigin." Af- ter a few years, he gave up newspaper work (he had l110ved to Balti1110re by this tÎ111e) and devoted hi111self exclu- sively to platform talks. He was popu- lar with audiences and the demand for his talks increased; so did his prices for them. He was elected President of the A111erican Press H u1110rists Society and widened the range of his tours to cover the whole country. He was always in- troduced to audiences as the celebrated h f " F ' .. Fl . " H aut or 0 lnnlgln to annlgan. e always had to recite it. In the days of the Lyceum Circuit he went over that circuit tÏ111e and again, and when the Chautauqua Circuit came along he went over that, also tir1)e and again. He has averaged two hundred talks a year in the past thirty-eight years, and the present year is likely to be his top for number of engage111ents. He re111e111- hers that during one season in the Mid- dle West he spoke at seventy-seven Chautauquas in seventy-seven days. He has spoken four hundred and nineteen tÏ111es in BaltÎ1110re alone, over a period of twenty-five years. Long ago he got tired of reciting "Finnigin," but audi- ences always shout for it in the end, as they used to shout at Dc Wolf Hopper to recite "Casey," and Mr. Gillilan al- ways c0111plies. In his tÏ111e he has ad- dressed all kinds of 111eetings, from a convention of bankers to an asse111bly of convicts at Sing Sing; both groups k d f d " F "'" as e or an got Innlgln. Mr. Gillilan moved fr0111 BaltÎ1110re to Washington about ten years ago. 19 ; : r ,i;; ' t t ,. , :} ' ,/,\ "J. ,rir(- ,', XJ , He's been 111arried for thirty years and has quite a fa111ily-a wife, two daugh- ters, a son, and several grandchildren. You can usually find hÎ111 at the Press Club in Washington, if he isn't out on the road-which he probably is. In 1924 he got away from it all by going to Europe with one of his daughters. His great desire when he was abroad was to meet Rudyard Kipling, who in those days was keeping pretty 111uch to hÎ111self. Gillilan wrote the fa1110us au- thor, asking for an interview, hut got no answer. So he wrote again. Still there was no answer. Thereupon the A111erican sat down and wrote a third C0111111uni- cation, this tÏ111e in verse, as follows: I liked your stuff. I like it yet. I'll read it again and again. To keep one's love for omelet One need not meet the hen. Thete was, to be sure, no reply to this. But there was a sequel. Two years lat- er, in an address in London accepting the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature, Mr. Kipling observed in the course of his remarks, "The time has passed when in order to appreciate an omelet one needs to be the hen." Strickland Gillilan feels sure that hI" letters to Rudyard Kipling didn't go astray. While his talks have always taken up l110St of his ti111e, Mr. Gillilan has 111an- aged to write a lot of verses since "Finni- gin." SOl11eone who counts such things has announced that Mr. Gillilan's verses are asked for oftener in the inquiry de-